I re-beat Aliens infestation on the DS for the first time in over a decade.
I still like it quite a bit; the sprite work is excellent, the sound effects are on point, and the combat mostly feels solid (shooting it out with human enemies behind cover turned into me vaulting the cover and blasting them at point blank). The weapons feel varied but still have a level of parity with each other such that I found myself switching between them fairly regularly just to have different gameplay experiences without feeling like I was crippling myself.
Once you get a handle on the game, it almost becomes too easy unless you get ambushed by a bunch of Aliens at once and get cornered. There's a couple difficulty spikes (the pressure suit segment was rough, the game isn't a very good platformer), especially the boss fights. Maybe I wasn't taking the time to learn attack patterns enough, but I found myself brute-forcing the fights a bit.
The coolest boss fight is easily the Jockey-Alien, it just looks rad and its animations are cool.
The "collect Marines" gimmick is neat but it feels half-baked - you can only have 4 at a time, so you have to either leave extras behind (except for on the Sulaco which you return to a few times) or intentionally get your Marines killed to pick up new people; the game basically penalizes you for playing well and withholds one of its more interesting features unless you suck or sabotage yourself. I'd have much preferred if I could have collected everyone like pokemon and swapped between them at save stations at my leisure.
It has metroidvania elements, but it's all very rudimentary and linear to the point where I'm hesitant to call it a full metroidvania. That's not a knock on the game, it's still fun, and the metroidvania elements work, it just feels like "babby's first metroidvania".
It's still a really cool game, although it's a little short and doesn't offer a ton in the way of replay other than using different Marines at different story moments just to see how the dialogue changes. I'd have been interested to know how it would have meshed with Aliens: Colonial Marines had that project not gone off the rails.